State Bank of India (SBI) and Bank of Baroda (BoB), two of the largest public sector banks of India, proposed on Saturday their gold deposits should be allowed to count toward their state-mandated cash reserve ratio (CRR) or statutory liquidity ratio (SLR). Arundhati Bhattacharya, the chairperson of SBI, made the proposal at a Gem & […]
About 700,000 Hong Kong citizens have voted so far in an unofficial referendum hosted by civic group Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) on democratic electoral reform, earning the ire of communist China. China has promised Hong Kong a direct vote for the next chief executive in 2017 instead of election via a largely […]
Philippine President Benigno Simeon “Noynoy” Aquino III was delivering his Independence Day speech when somebody from the crowd shouted: “Oust the pork barrel king! There’s no change in the Philippines!” The person who disrupted the president’s speech was student leader Emmanuel Pio Mijares. The president was speechless for a brief moment, as the Chronicle of […]
Three journalists from the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television news network have been sentenced to seven years in jail by a court in Cairo today for spreading false news and helping the Muslim Brotherhood group which are now banned as terrorists. The three journalists — the Australian correspondent Peter Greste, Canadian-Egyptian journalist and Cairo bureau chief for […]
A court in Xinyu, China, has sentenced three anti-corruption activists to prison for causing public disturbance. Wei Zhongping and Liu Ping received a prison sentence of six-and-a-half years under charges of “using evil religion to sabotage law enforcement” and “picking fights and provoking trouble”. A third activist Li Sihua was also convicted for the last […]
Japan banned possession of child pornography though a bill passed in the Upper House of Japanese Parliament yesterday. The ban prohibits owning a real life image of child pornography depicting a child under the age of eighteen. However, this does not include depictions of children in computer-generated or drawn forms, such as anime and manga. […]
Japanese officials announced on Friday the country’s annual whaling expedition to the north-west Pacific Ocean has captured and killed 30 minke whales. This comes after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) banned Japan from continuing its Antarctic scientific whale hunting programmes in March this year. The Australian and New Zealand governments had brought the Antarctic […]
In some parts of China, dog meat is considered a delicacy at the dinner table and the practice of consuming dog meat has been around since 500BC, or possibly even earlier. However, as more and more Chinese are raising dogs as pets nowadays, they consider eating dog meat as cruel and barbaric behaviour. In the […]
